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By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception
of such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a
certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far all go the same
way. But departure begins with the attempt to establish what this
basic Kind is in itself, and how it is a recipient and of what.
To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are the Real Beings;
existence is limited to bodies; there is one only Matter, the
stuff underlying the primal-constituents of the Universe:
existence is nothing but this Matter: everything is some
modification of this; the elements of the Universe are simply
this Matter in a certain condition.
The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine
beings so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of Matter-
and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body
void of quality, but a magnitude.
Another school makes it incorporeal: among these, not all hold
the theory of one only Matter; some of them while they maintain
the one Matter, in which the first school believes, the
foundation of bodily forms, admit another, a prior, existing in
the divine-sphere, the base of the Ideas there and of the
unembodied Beings.
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